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Tuesday, March 05, 2019

The Real Cost of Knowledge | Science - The Atlantic

The University of California has broken with one of the world’s largest
academic publishers. Is this the end of a very profitable business
model?, inform Sarah Zhang, staff writer at The Atlantic.

The Geisel Library at UC San DiegoPhoto: Lenny Ignelzi / AP

This past Thursday, the University of California, one of the largest research institutions in the world, blew up negotiationswith
Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of research articles in the
world. The university would no longer pay Elsevier millions of dollars a
year to subscribe to its journals. It simply walked away.

Not
so long ago, blowing off a publisher as important as Elsevier would
have been unthinkable. But academics have been joining in an open revolt
against Elsevier’s extremely profitable business model. In 2012,
mathematicians started a petition to boycott the publisher that has
since been signed by more than 17,000 researchers. In December 2016,universities in Germany stopped paying for Elsevier’s journals. In 2018, the same thing happened in Sweden and then Hungary...

The University of California cast its negotiations with Elsevier as a
battle over open access, too. It went in with the goal of making all
research from UC authors open access by default. The university wanted
one contract to cover both the cost of publishing open-access articles
and the cost of journal subscriptions. Elsevier says it offered UC a
“unique model” that would offer researchers options for publishing. But
the two sides couldn’t agree on specifics or a number. On one hand, this
is a dispute about library fees. On the other, this is a dispute about
the future of how knowledge is disseminated. UC Berkeley’s university
librarian, Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, did not hesitate to put it in
high-minded terms: “This really affects the progress of science in
society and the advancement of humanity.”Read more... Source: The Atlantic

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.